Friday, January 30, 2004

Wait, if online campaigning is over, why is Kerry hiring? 10:37:25 PM    comment []

Why bother refuting Andrew Orlowski? For one thing, it's just so easy. Some lowlights and howlers from his latest rant: Nothing against Jerome Armstrong, but calling him "Howard Dean's Net architect" is an enormous overstatement at best. Zephyr Teachout and Joe Trippi told me that Meetups for Dean predated the campaign's discovery of the service. "Nonetheless, more than 400 individuals had signed up for Dean events by February, when Trippi seized on the Meetup service as a way of jumpstarting interest in Dean nationally." (Baseline, Nov. '03). Of course the campaign then ran with Meetup -- but they did "just happen" in the beginning, contrary to Orlowski's article. In direct contrast to one of Orlowski's main points, Trippi and other senior staffers told me that books relevant to the campaign included Small Pieces Loosely Joined and The Cluetrain Manifesto, along with Smart Mobs, Moral Politics, Bowling Alone, and Emergence. "We've read all that stuff," says Trippi. " (Baseline) Orlowski overstates the importance of blogging to the campaign, or at least spends too much time talking about people blogging about the campaign -- a common enough mistake to be sure. Blogging has been important to Dean, but other online tools are equally or more important. "I can imagine the campaign without the blog, but not without Meetup," (Zephyr Teachout, senior Dean staffer, in Baseline.) And yes, I am involved with the Digital Democracy Teach-In he trashes....which means I know that some interesting campaign insiders may indeed be onhand. 9:41:14 PM    comment []

Erskine Blogs: "Stop treating the South like a foreign land." Step one to losing a contest: assume you are going to lose. 9:50:23 AM    comment []

I wasn't sure about accepting an anti-NRA ad -- I don't like the hardline politics of the NRA, and the enemies list featured in the ad is just creepy, but I am at the same time protective of my 2d Amendment rights...then I got another ad submitted via BlogAds, this one for Democratic congressional candidate Ben Chandler, and he boasts an "A" rating from the NRA, to go along with his Sierra Club endorsement...so I accepted them both. 8:28:36 AM    comment []

A Dean supporter on the campaign weblog, commenting on the first post from Trippi's replacement, Roy Neel: "we can do this, but you have to trust us as much as we’ve trusted you." Neel at the Dean blog: "I’m not here to do Joe Trippi’s job." 8:15:00 AM    comment []